6 or 7 years ago we hired the outfit that is just west of Uvalde, on the northside of 90 to fly 6600 acres that bordered the west side of the Devil's down at Slaughter Bend. It was $3000.00 for the morning. We covered it all and found out we had more Corsicans and Texas Dall than whitetails.

The main ranches were west of Del Rio on 90, before you get to Comstock. One 12K ranch, one 10K ranch and one 5K. The 12 and 5 were contiguous. We started out with 120's and 130's. Fast forward to 10 years of consistent feeding and not killing young bucks and we were doing high 130's and 140's, with some 150's and a few 160's thrown in.

Feeding is time consuming and expensive, but if you aren't trigger happy it will pay dividends. Your growth will be slow and you have to keep measurements on every buck, every year and you will see incremental growth.

Feeding will NOT turn a 120 into a 140 in one year.

Put a burn plan in action and improve that habitat, and take some more doe.
Let those young bucks walk if possible.

A: Total buck harvest should be very similar to doe harvest. Your numbers are headed in the ring direction. Two simple solutions are to allow people who may not have hunting opportunities, or youth hunters etc. to shoot does, or to institute a rule that no one is allowed to kill a buck until they’ve killed a doe. Whatever the case, get your harvest ratio in check.

B: The majority of your management bucks should be from the yearling class, at least until it’s difficult to tell the difference between the good one and the bad ones. If you set a number for your total buck harvest, then every spike or barely forked 4pt means a 130” buck gets one year older.

I’m going to give an oversimplified, but otherwise correct way to view management. You will then have to get real information, and make real decisions that include a lot variables not mentioned and the reality will be much more complex, the principles will put in the right direction. Then, because you won’t want to actually micro manage, you can come up with some simple rule to guide your harvest in the general direction that more intense management would. Assume that the population is currently at the ideal number. Assume that does over 1.5yr average one successful fawn(obviously this would be adjusted and accounted for in reality). Assume that mortality only occurs as a harvest. You want a 1:1 do buck ratio. We don’t want to harvest deer prior to 1.5yrs. Now, if we examine the assumptions you will see that the age at which you desire to harvest a non-management deer controls how many management deer must be harvested every year. I could use percents, but I’ll just use 200 deer so that I can use really easy numbers. In our scenario we have 100 fawns each year, 50 are bucks, and we don’t want to harvest any deer until 1.5yrs, so each year we have 50 new bucks that are now 1.5yrs old and 100 older bucks. As I said. Your desired harvest age now dictates your management strategy. You want 100 total bucks at the end, some will be the target age and the rest will be management. So, if our target age is 5.5yrs, there are four age classes above your yearling crop, each containing 25 deer. If we moved this to 6.5yrs, there would be five age classes, each containing 20 deer. So if we harvest the entire trophy age class that’s 25 for 5.5yrs or 20 for 6.5yrs, which leaves 25 and 30 deer respectively that still need to be removed. Your yearling crop has 50 bucks and the rest of the age classes have 25 or 20 depending on target harvest age. While many are tempted to let yearlings walk, that means harvesting deer from your age classes that are already smaller in number, and it means fewer 5.5-6.5yr old deer next year. You cannot harvest 25 5.5yr old deer every year if you are harvesting from the 2.5-4.5 age classes as management. Pretend that you harvested your 25 5.5 yr olds and tried to take your other 25 management bucks from the 2.5yr age class....now you have no 2.5yr age class left. You harvested it all. What about 10 from 2.5, 10 from 3.5, and 5 from 4.5? Well, next year you’ll have only 20 5.5 year old bucks, 15 4.5yr old bucks, and 15 3.5yr old bucks, 50 2.5yr old bucks and still need to harvest 50. Now only 20 can come from the trophy class, you’re down five trophies. If you manage none from the 4.5 and 3.5 classes, you’ll be down to only 15 the next two years, and you’ll be taking a whopping 30 management deer from the 2.5yr age class. Notice again, that you’re never able to get back to 25 bucks(or 20 if harvesting at 6.5yrs)per age class above your management minimum. However, if you go against the resistance of harvesting yearling bucks for management, you can harvest your 25 or 20 from the top class(5.5 or 6.5) and harvest the bottom 25 or 30(depending on trophy age) from the yearling class(50 bucks) and then you will b able to continually harvest 25 or 20 trophies at the target age every single year. Remember we are assuming that you are at the ideal population, therefore it is fixed, and if you raise the target trophy age, you increase the number of age classes and therefore decrease the number of deer per age class. This means more harvest from the yearling class, and fewer trophies. If you decrease the target trophy age, you decrease the number of age classes, therefore you increasing the number of deer per class, which increases the number of trophies and decrease required yearling harvest. 4.5yrs is below the ideal target age because most deer will peak at 5.5 or 6.5, but you would only have to cull 20 of your 50 yearling bucks and would get 30 trophies. 6.5 is pushing it because you have to cull more than half of your yearling bucks and that makes them much more difficult to judge, many deer will be on decline by 6.5 and you only get to harvest 20 instead of 25.

^^^ The above example assumes a lot of perfection that won’t happen. You won’t be able to harvest every 5.5yr old buck. They’ll be sneaky. You can however harvest the target number of bucks that seem to be about the right age. You won’t get the perfect number of fawns each year, but you can get a good idea of how many you actually did get, and set harvest numbers based on that fawn crop. You won’t have every buck survive to the target trophy age, but it will still guide your target harvest number. This brings up another issue with targeting too high an age class. The older the target age class, the fewer deer can be in each age class and the more dear you will have die due nature. You can’t eat, sell or mount trophies that leave, get eaten, or die where you can’t find them. Even if you set the target at 5.5, you’ll have plenty of sneaky deer make it to 6.5 or 7.5. Heck, even if you set the target at 4.5, you’ll have older bucks slipping through the cracks, and you can manage your bottom 40% of yearlings instead of bottom 50%.

A very simple strategy is this

1: Get your sex ratio to 1:1 ASAP

2. Get your population to the biologist recommended ideal AFTER getting sex ratio in check

3. Get a deer count and set total buck harvest to maintain sex ratio and population.

4. Count yearling bucks and harvest accordingly. (For 4.5 trophy age harvest 40% of yearling bucks 50% for 5.5yrs or 60% for 6.5yrs...actually harvest fewer to compensate for unintended mortality)

5. Harvest the remaining number of total buck harvest to maintain sex ratio and population as free choice from non-yearlings. Your management happened already you so won’t be high grading, it requires no special instructions or guiding and everyone who gets to harvest a trophy is happy because they shot what they wanted.

Under that system, you simply set the number of does that need to go and allow he hunter to shoot whichever he wants until your quota is met. You also set your “trophy” buck number and allow the hunters that get to shoot a trophy to shoot the trophy that they want. A management buck is any yearling, or even any buck of any age, that has fewer than X number of points(4,5,6 whatever your seeing as being the bottom 30-50% of yearlings) until you hit the management number. You can micromanage and possible get and minutely better result, but you have guys hunting management deer that argue about which deer should be culled and which shouldn’t because they actually wanted to shoot a big deer that wasn’t quite a trophy, you have guys trophy hunting that get down to one or two bucks left on the hit list and they can’t get a shot at them and aren’t allowed to shoot any of the numerous good bucks that they see. Under this system you just say, you shoot a doe of your choice, you shoot a buck with four points or less, and you get to shoot any buck you want. The end. No guiding, no arguing, no worrying, and you’ll get way better bucks in only a few years.

This is what is known as "high grading". It's why point rules and grade rules don't work in long term, especially in limited areas. It's why AR's are helping in high density areas and hurting in low density areas too.

That said, unless you have a good solid knowledge of the D/B ratio, no one knows for sure what to kill. "experts" that say gotta kill does, or gotta do this, without that knowledge, are really not experts. I've seen the doe killers wipe out places too;

Get a real count, and a real biologist to help

^^^ And if for some reason you can’t get a real count and a biologist, you can get a lot better estimate with game cameras than by winging it. You can usually identify individual bucks that are not yearlings. Count non-yearling bucks. Count how many does are on all your different cams at approximately the same time and day so that you aren’t counting any does twice. Now you know you have at least that many does. Then count how many does you in the same picture as a buck and get a rough average. Now multiply by how many bucks you have identified. You probably do not have any more does than this. You now have a rough maximum and minimum for how many does you actually. Next count fawns. Fawn to doe ratio will help you figure out if your population is okay or too high. Does from 2.5 to 5.5 should impregnate with twins. Poor nutrition will cause them to selectively abort one fetus. It will almost always be a female fetus if she is carrying one. This is nature’s way of keeping population in check when range conditions are bad. A doe would breed and increase the population for every year of her life, but a buck will not. It’s better than not bearing a fawn also, because genetic diversity is preserved. Anyway, the point is that you should have 1-2 fawns per doe. Some does won’t have successfully bred, some fawn will have been killed by predators, but less than one fawn per doe points to some sort of problem.

Depends on what part of the county but a lot of it 20 older age class bucks on 10k acres is too many.

On the surface looks like you take too many of your middle aged bucks and not enough doe.

Call Mackey McEntire with Concho Aviation. He flies a lot of the area and knows deer management. Just the knowledge from him after flying your place will be worth the hourly cost.